SOLD OUT! All CD copies have been purchased. Please download the tracks and rock our newest album!
"Cherchez La Femme" is a limited CD release available to collectors and Dash supporters. It is offered exclusively through this website. Artwork by Damie Leigh.
There’s still plenty of characteristic Dash on the album but they manage to get in
SOLD OUT! All CD copies have been purchased. Please download the tracks and rock our newest album!
"Cherchez La Femme" is a limited CD release available to collectors and Dash supporters. It is offered exclusively through this website. Artwork by Damie Leigh.
There’s still plenty of characteristic Dash on the album but they manage to get in everything, from bluesy stomps to acoustic numbers to Cajun rock. It’s their first album to open with a country song, and to close with an outright power-pop number. The first, “Who You Gonna Love,” is the kind of song that might have been too uncharacteristic in the past. “It’s a clip-clop Western song, but it has some pretty crazy lyrics; cowboys don’t talk much about free-flowing daydreams. So, it’s a psychedelic breakup song.” The pop tune, “Take You for a Ride,” pays a longstanding musical debt to Big Star and The dB’s. “Guys like Peter Holsapple and Alex Chilton made me proud of Southern pop.” Keeping that in mind, he got dB’s/Continental Drifters co-frontman Holsapple to sing on the track, along with Tammy Ealom from the Dressy Bessy, a band from Athens, Georgia. When he attempted to pay Holsapple for the virtual session, Davis got reminded that he’d sung on an album with The dB’s a couple of decades ago, so one good turn deserved another.
Dash is releasing the album in stages: At the moment a very limited CD (just 100 were made) is available through their website. A digital version and full-release CD will follow. But the future versions won’t have the Neil Young cover, “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere”—one of the few non-originals to make a regular Dash album, but one of Davis’ favorite tracks. “I can thank Cheryl (his wife and sometimes lyricist, writer Cheryl Wagner) for rekindling my love of Neil Young. She thought it would be a great song for Dash. And that was one of the first songs this lineup learned—It has all three of us singing, which was something we’d never done in this band. I thought, let’s really go bombastic with this, so I threw in a bunch of solos and the big rock part in the middle, where Wade does all his Keith Moon shit on the drums.” Alas, Young is a stickler for fidelity and won’t allow his songs to be covered on streaming services, so it will be replaced by a Spanish version of “Burn in Hell,” nodding to a South American fanbase that’s been vocal online.
The album introduces a new Dash lineup with bassist/guitarist/singer Chance Casteel and drummer Wade Hymel. Both are also members of Borealis Rex, which also includes Davis and runs concurrently with Dash. As fate would have it, this band also just lost a show at French Quarter Fest. The previous Dash lineup didn’t end great—after a few too many days cooped up together on the tour bus, both members of the rhythm section jumped ship—so Davis welcomes the enthusiasm of the new guys. “They’ve been calling rehearsals I can’t even make. They’ve got solid musical backgrounds, they pick things up real quick, and they can play multiple instruments. And for the new record, they pitched in and picked the songs with me.”
